That's an illusion. Brevity is never the goal; code clarity should be the goal. Your sed script looks like it might be a maintenance nightmare. The advantage sed has is speed, which can be an important consideration.

Anyway, the problems as not with the SED Command, looks to be a file encoding problem when creating a file in on a windows machine and transferring to to Linux platform. Once i cut an pasted into a new file, it worked as expected.